


No Peace in the Kingdom of Women

by scioscribe



Category: Carrie - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mind Manipulation, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 04:52:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13046886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Carrie turns down Tommy's invitation to the prom, so Sue offers her own friendship instead.  It doesn't go exactly as planned.





	No Peace in the Kingdom of Women

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SoundandColor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoundandColor/gifts).



> Two King Easter eggs here, if anyone likes those.
> 
> Happy Yuletide! I loved how you talked about these two.

**1**

It was an ugly thing.  When Tommy told her that Carrie had insisted on her no—and Sue could imagine it, in fact couldn’t keep herself from imagining it, the amelodic, clotted huskiness of Carrie’s voice, simultaneously hesitant and so thick you couldn’t imagine ever piercing through it—Sue’s first response was an overwhelming and somehow metallic resentment.   _That ungrateful bitch_.  It horrified her.

_From scapegoat to pet goat, you always thought of her as somebody you could use.  How dare she get in the way of Miss Suzy Creamcheese making things up to her?  First you told her to plug up her pussy and now you want her to plug up her mouth.  You really are a treat.  You’re just Chris Hargensen with better manners and longer skirts._

She was worrying her fingernail back and forth against a torn cuticle on her thumb and wasn’t surprised when she felt a sudden bite of pain and then a hot bloom of blood.  She closed her hand into a fist.  “Did she say why she wouldn’t go?”

“She doesn’t know how to dance.”

Sue could remember those old middle school gym-room square dance practices, everyone awkward in cotton shorts, Carrie not allowed to touch anyone else’s hips or even shoulders, her wounded yelp when she’d gotten goosed by some boy.  She sighed.  “I guess I knew that.”

“At least you tried,” Tommy offered, and that, Sue thought, was perfect high school absolution: it was like the free points they gave you on the SAT just for filling in your own name correctly.

She knew she could content herself with that.  It had a jauntiness to it, a kind of resolved return to picture-perfect normalcy, like adjusting a Peter Pan collar back into place.  All the relevant words might as well have had little trademark symbols off to one side.  She had Tried, so she was Good in addition to being Popular.  So that solved her problem, didn’t it?

But it didn’t solve Carrie’s.

Not, she supposed, that one night at prom—even with Tommy Ross—would have done that anyway.  How were a few hours supposed to neatly box up seventeen years?

Tommy stroked her shoulder, and the conversation turned to an indifferent kind of love in which she couldn’t find a way to lie comfortably and in which her mind was always somewhere else.  It surprised her that she was even able to come, with a wrench that felt like a muscle cramp letting go.  She didn’t know exactly what she had been thinking of.

**2**

Carrie had no more read human agency behind Tommy’s offer than she would have behind a solar eclipse.  Not once she believed—as much as she could believe—that he hadn’t been trying to trick her.  Kindness was so rare it came upon her like some unforeseeable disaster.  An act of God.

Momma’s voice in her head said she was blaspheming—worse, blackening the Spirit so much she was like the Pharisees even Jesus had called unpardonable sinners.  God’s will was that she turn Tommy Ross down, as she had.  _God gave strength to your tongue so you could refuse him, steel in your weak spine so you could turn your back on him.  It was the devil who set him on you in the first place, sniffing for blood, sniffing for that wet place._

_No, Momma.  I only said no because I don’t know the steps.  Any of them._

And maybe because it had felt like too much?  Like starving to death and then being offered nothing but a huge Valentine’s Day box of chocolates, the kind she sometimes bought for herself, enduring the knowing stare of the gum-popping cashier who knew she had no one to give them to, no one to give them to her.  Or the way scuba divers—she remembered this from one of the few biology classes her momma had not contradicted—got the bends coming up too fast from the deep.  Carrie didn’t know what the bends were, exactly.  In a funny way, she associated them with the _flex_ she could now feel inside her mind.  She was rising too fast.

“Carrie?”

She had been daydreaming, slumped on her elbows over her lunch tray.  She saw, with a dull lack of surprise, that she had gotten the sleeve of her sweater in the gravy on the Salisbury steak.

The voice had come from Sue Snell, who was sliding onto the bench across the table from her.

She was not one of the really bad ones, but there were no good ones.  And she had been in the locker room, her fingers sticky with the adhesive from the back of a sanitary napkin.  Carrie remembered her face—the elongated shape of that pretty mouth laughing—but didn’t know how she knew about that slight tackiness on Sue’s fingers.  It had just come to her.

_If she tries anything I’ll wrap her hair around her neck._

“Is it okay for me to sit here?”

“What do you want?” Carrie said.

Sue spoke in a stilted way, like she was reading from cue cards, but her gaze was on Carrie and Carrie alone, with a kind of intensity that took Carrie aback.  “I just wanted to talk to you.  Get to know you a little.  I—I’m sorry about what happened.”

“What happened when?”

It seemed to startle a laugh out of her.  “God, I guess I do have to be more specific, don’t I?  I wish I didn’t.  In the locker room.  The—the yelling and everything.”

Carrie knew how these people were.  They threw out apologies like used Kleenex—something embarrassing deposited here, please don’t look.  They always expected automatic forgiveness, like she should want it all disposed of too, like they were the same in that.  But even so, she had gotten so few apologies over the years.  She couldn’t say it was fine—she could hate more easily than she could lie.

But she said, “It’s not like you were the only one.”

“I know, but,” as if she needed to convince Carrie of her guilt, as if Carrie didn’t understand it, “everything matters, doesn’t it?  Even if you’re not a big part of it.”

“Like the Roman senators stabbing Caesar,” Carrie suggested.  She thought it would end the conversation.  It was better to seem strange than stupid.

Instead, Sue smiled.  “Very much like that.  Only I don’t think you’d just declared yourself dictator of Rome.”

Bravery suffused through her.  Her fingertips seemed to tingle with it.  “It was still morning.  Maybe I just didn’t have enough time.”

“You must like to read,” Sue said, almost curiously, and it took Carrie a moment to understand what she meant.  Did she think the business-trade track of Chamberlain was exclusively woodshop and typing, that Carrie had learned to make a birdfeeder and go as fast as seventy words a minute but could never have stumbled across Julius Caesar?  It was an insult, and she realized it at the same time as she realized she didn’t mind it—not because Sue hadn’t meant it, though she hadn’t, but because it wasn’t about _her_.  She did not think Carrie was stupid, she was just surprised that Carrie was smart.  That felt more bearable.

And it was true.  “Sometimes I go to the library after school lets out.”

“Sometimes I read the little taglines on the old paperbacks on the rack at the Fruit Company,” Sue said very seriously.  “They’re very educational too.”

It was the longest real conversation she could remember having with anyone other than Momma and there was an uneasy happiness inside her that she knew how to continue it, that she was in on the joke: she knew the books Sue meant, the ones with the half-undressed women on the covers, the ones with the men with guns looking chisel-faced and gunslinger-eyed.  In a way, they really had been educational for her.  The presence of them in a hamburger joint that catered openly to kids said that these pictures that shocked her were nothing.  All those unbuttoned shirts were nothing.  Just slivers of painted skin.

Eventually she had even been brave enough to make her way over to them.  In her hands, they hadn’t felt like nothing, they had felt powerful.  Trashy books, Momma called them, written in hellfire, because there was only the one Book and whatever was not made in its image was only paper and so was made to burn.  To Carrie’s surprise, the books themselves made no apology for that:

_She crawled back out of the grave… and now she’s here to take him there!_

_They called him the speed demon… his bike is like a bat out of hell!_

_She told him everything… and she DID everything!_

“You can learn a lot about the dot-dot-dot,” Carrie said, and then the word bumped into her forehead, clumsy but polite.  “Ellipses.”

She’d meant it to be funny, but Sue said, “Lately I’ve been thinking that everybody lets their whole life go by in ellipses.”

Carrie thought about the grim slideshow of a life she dreaded, the one that clicked by in her head frame by frame whenever she closed her eyes: a small, closed life in the shadow of the luminous tableaux, an empty life with no color but the blood-red of her own sins.  “I don’t want that.”  She said it with a low, almost growling intensity, and she winced.  She knew what they thought of her voice, of the way it slackened when she wasn’t paying attention, of the way it was either too shrieky or too gravelly, too much or too little.

That same wolf-snarl was in Sue’s voice too, though.  “Yes.  I don’t want that either.”

**3**

Making friends with Carrie White was like getting down on your knees with kibble in your hand to feed a stray dog, half-worried it would bite your fingers, and then without noticing it you were down on all fours yourself, like there was no difference between you, and what you’d spilled in the dirt wasn’t kibble but red rare meat, something you both wanted to tear up, something you were both hungry for.  You thought you were offering it but you never had it.  You thought you could tame her but the wilderness was too thick for it.

“It’s the original sin,” Carrie said, when Sue told her—well, not this, but a version of this, made vague beyond all recognition.  “Thinking you’re better.”

She said it with placid self-assurance.  Sue could never tell what she believed or what she didn’t, but, with a flash of anger, she knew she _could_ tell that Carrie herself always thought she was the better one.

“Isn’t that you and your mother?”

Carrie cast her eyes down on her lunch tray.  “I don’t want to talk about Momma.”

“Fine,” Sue said tightly.  “You, then.  Don’t you think you’re better, too?”

“Yes,” Carrie said.  She was the only person Sue had ever met who would answer questions like that not just honestly but as if she understood and felt the weight of them.  “Better but—but not beautiful.”

That was the first day Sue asked her to come home with her after school, just for an hour or so: she extended the invitation with a caution that made her feel like she was in some old-fashioned courtship.  She wasn’t sure if Carrie would say yes or not.  She was surprised to find that she _wanted_ Carrie to say yes, and not because it would represent some kind of slow inchworm crawl toward making things right.  More that she had a Bob Dylan record she knew Carrie had never heard.

“I’d love that,” Carrie said.  Her eyes met Sue’s.

So that afternoon, Sue put the record on as they sat on her bed and talked.  White chenille bedspread underneath them—Carrie kept stroking it like it was a cat—a clock on the wall in the plastic shape of a star.  Posters on the walls.  Carrie regarded all of it, from the magazines on the bedside table to the goofy string art to the height-marks on the doorframe, as artifacts from an archaeological dig in some foreign country.  But even though she never stopped looking around the room, she made good, steady conversation, she spared the concentration necessary to pick out a new favorite song.  She was smart—certainly smarter than anyone, including their teachers, realized, but intelligence wasn’t all of it.  It was like she had _more_ —just more mind to devote to things.  More attention to split.

But after a while, Sue noticed that the one place she returned to over and over again was the closet, which was open just a crack.

“I always leave it open a little,” Sue said, turning her head.

“You’re afraid of the bogeyman?”

“No, but that’s why I won’t have a bedskirt.  No kidding.  I mean, it’s not the bogeyman, really, but I don’t like not being able to see what’s underneath.  With the closet it’s just that I usually end up slinging my bathrobe over it or something and if I forget, I’m going to end up throwing whatever it is on the floor.”

“There’s nothing there now.”

“In the spirit of hospitality,” Sue said gravely, “because I knew I wanted to invite you over, I put the bathrobe away.”  Something struck her.  “Do you want to borrow anything?”

Carrie closed her hand around a fistful of chenille.  “I couldn’t.”

“To try it on, at least.”

Carrie shook her head.

“You said you’d never been to the mall.  It’ll be like being at the mall, only I’ll let you keep all your money.  Please, Carrie, I want you to.”

Carrie stood slowly and without any more argument.  She opened the closet door and then the little bulb inside flared on at once, even though Sue had forgotten to tell her that the pull-cord was off to the side, not at all where you’d think it would be.  She hadn’t even seen Carrie’s hand move.  Boy, when she decided she was going to do something, she went for it like a cobra.

The moment had a glassy fragility to it.  If she said the wrong thing, it would break.  So she just watched as Carrie slid out a cranberry-colored skirt.  It was modest by anyone else’s standards, a Good Girl skirt she’d worn to meet Tommy’s parents.  Carrie looked at it for a moment and then put it back.  Next she drew out a pair of striped hot pants.  Sue had never even seen her in jeans.  She had seen her naked—knew the exact angle of her bare breasts, knew the tuft of wiry, ash blonde hair between her legs—but never in jeans.

“I can turn around,” Sue offered, but Carrie seemed to be in a kind of trance and did not answer, even with a nod or a shake of her head.

She unzipped her long, heavy skirt and let it tumble to the floor, where it lay in a dispirited puddle.  Then a slip, then pettipants, which Sue hadn’t even thought they made anymore.  She was wearing plain white cotton underwear with imperfect, sagging elastic.  No—not plain white.  They had tiny pale pink polka dots on them.  She wondered what Carrie had suffered to get that little bit of prettiness no one else would even see, wondered if Carrie thought it was better that people wouldn’t see it.  No one could call it ugly, then.  It was something that was all hers.

She stepped into the hot pants and pulled them up, tight between her legs.  The noise of the zipper was like the loudest thing in the world.

And then there she stood, Carrie White, in red and white striped hot pants that came only halfway down her thighs, that hugged her crotch so snugly that they almost invited more attention there than when she’d been naked.  And she was pretty.  Even in her dowdy blouse, with the thick and bulky shadows of undershirt and bra and _girdle_ , she was pretty.  Her legs were well-formed, toned from dogged walking that didn’t require the grace of sports.  She didn’t shave—Sue bet her mother would have had a conniption fit if she ever did—but the hair on her legs was blonde and light, almost as invisible as the polka dots on her underwear.

Sue felt a sudden, unwelcome heaviness, a heat.  She said, “There’s a midi-top in there that goes with them.”

Carrie found it without any trouble.  She took everything off on top, too, and put on one of Sue’s spare bras without asking: just walked over to the dresser and picked one out.  Pale lavender.  It was too big for her and the cups gaped loosely over her breasts like hands hoping she would move forward into them.  She slid the midi on.  It had no sleeves.  Carrie’s bare shoulders were as milky-white as her stomach, equally unexposed to the sun.  Her tan, what there was of it, began just a few inches above her wrists.

Sue didn’t know what she expected Carrie to say, but it sure wasn’t what she _did_ say, and rather tonelessly, fidgeting with her top: “You asked Tommy to invite me to the dance, didn’t you.”

“Carrie—”

“Why would you do that?  Why would you do any of this?”

She had a thousand answers and not one of them, in that moment, seemed to fit entirely, as if the action were the only truth and her reasons for it irrelevant.  “I wanted to.”  Maybe that was closest.

Carrie said, “I look like the Whore of Babylon.”

“Thanks.”

Carrie didn’t seem to catch Sue’s withering tone.  She was still looking at herself in the skinny full-length mirror on Sue’s closet door.  “She lived next door.”

“You lived next door to the Whore of Babylon?  No wonder your mother went nuts.”

That got her attention.  “Momma’s not crazy.”

 _Then she’s just awful_ , Sue thought, _and that’s worse._ “Who lived next door, Carrie?”

“The girl in the swimsuit.  The little bikini.  She was sunbathing, and Momma doesn’t like that no matter what somebody’s wearing.  She fell out of her top—one of her breasts—but I was talking to her.  I was so young.”  She smoothed the hot pants down against her thighs, her fingers poised along the hemline.  There had to be more to the story than that.

Sue could see why Margaret White hated sunbathing, though: it felt like worship, but not of God.  Something pagan, something Aztec, to rub yourself with oil and lay down your body as a burnt offering to beauty, the sun hot like velvet against your bare skin.  With Carrie, Sue was constantly reminded of how sensual the world was, how full of delight and danger.  So many things to not be allowed to touch!

“She was pretty,” Carrie said, her voice so empty and yearning.

Sue said, “You’re beautiful.”

**4**

Momma was waiting for her when she came home.  She was sitting on the sofa with the faded pattern, her head given a greenish halo by the light from the luminescent picture above her.  She was holding knitting needles but not knitting.

“Where have you been going after school?”

Carrie kept her eyes on those long needles.  “I just walk, Momma.  Or I go and look at the dress patterns to see if there’s one I want to buy.”

“That godless, interfering, gossipy Mina Weathers came up to me after work,” Momma said, her hands still rigid around the knitting needles, her knuckles still white, “and she said how glad she’d been to see that my daughter had found a friend.  This— _Susan Snell_.”  She said it like it was the name of Jezebel, the name of Bathsheba.  If only she knew what Carrie had had against her own body just an hour ago.

She stood still.  _Pull the whole house down on her.  On the both of you._ “She’s a nice girl.  Everyone likes her.”

“I know what kinds of things _everyone_ likes.  The kind of girls that are friendly to _everyone_.  If she’s popular, then she drinks.  If she’s popular, then she lies down with boys and opens her legs for them.  She’ll smoke.  She’ll take the Lord’s name in vain.  She’ll dress so that men turn around and stare at her when she walks down the street, oh yes.”

“Sue isn’t like that.”  But her protest was weak, because of course Sue had offered her a cigarette once, from a little case with a pearl on the clasp: had held it out to her like a secret.  Because of course she knew, as everyone at Chamberlain knew, that Sue and Tommy were going together.  Because of course she had seen the clothes.

She tried again.  “Sue’s nice to me, Momma.”

Momma stood.  “You won’t see her again.”

“Yes, I will.”

“Do you think I don’t know?” her momma said softly.  Behind her eyes, there was a kindness that was disconnected from the rest of her, disconnected from reason, but nonetheless sincere.  “Do you think I don’t know what those girls have always done to you?  I know the torments that are visited upon the righteous, woman, I know.  And I have always suffered them with you and held your hands.  And now one of them wants to put a collar on your neck and you’ll let her clasp it, no, Carrie.  You need to be stronger than that.  We must all be as shrewd as serpents, yes, we must.”

“I need to have a friend,” Carrie said.  There was a thick, ugly lump in her throat.  “I need somebody—somebody I can like, who maybe likes me too.”

There was no kindness to her now, no soft teary shine.  Her eyes were the deadlights of madness.

 _It’s in her blood_ , Carrie thought, barely knowing what she meant.  _It’s in her blood and she gave it to me.  But she has it too and it’s waiting for her—and she can’t use it but it uses her—it does._

Or perhaps she only wanted this to not be her mother.  The way Little Red Riding Hood must have hoped to see wolf-tracks in spilled flour on the kitchen floor.

“Does she look at you?” Momma said quietly.

“What?”  But of course she felt her face grow hot, thinking of how she had stood before the mirror, looking at some unrecognizable girl with her hair lifted up off her neck, with her taut, well-shaped legs on display.  _You’re beautiful_.

“Does she look at you?  Do you let her look at you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know,” as final as the Judgment.  “The sin was deep in you even before your dirtypillows came, even before you were in school with all—those—girls.  I remember how you looked at her.”

“The Whore of Babylon,” Carrie whispered.

“You _know_.  You _look_.”

“Momma—”

“If thine right eye offends thee,” Momma muttered, and then her hand swung toward Carrie’s face.

Time went slow, like honey drizzling down off a spoon.  It felt like there was time enough to turn around and look behind her and see all the years laid out— _wolf-tracks_ —that had brought them to this, to the blur of steel sharpness and the absence of all reason.  She remembered Momma wiping blood off her knees, soothing her because the boys had pushed her and she’d fallen; Momma telling her she was brave.  The girl’s sun-streaky bosom, unguardedly pale on the undersides but tan on top.  The clamor of the stones and the steam that had come up from the ice on the ground.  God punishes us that we might be refined.  Sue talking about ellipses, Sue offering to look the other way so Carrie could change.

_And Carrie had not told her to turn around._

_Push.  
_

Both knitting needles were driven deep into the floor like surveyor’s stakes.  Danger here: keep out.  Her momma’s fingers were bright pink from the friction of how quickly they had left her hands, her mouth open in an unlovely O.

Carrie’s eyes were so wet that for a long moment she thought she had gone crazy, too, that Momma had done it after all, had cut out her eyes so she would not sin.  But soon the haze of tears left her and she could still see everything.  The Black Forest cuckoo clock.  The afghan Momma had knitted years ago with those same needles.  The little box of teabags on the kitchen table.

_I know this place like the back of my hand._

“Devil.”

She felt immensely tired.  “I’m not the devil, Momma.  I’m not.”

“You are,” Margaret White said, with a long pause, “ _unnatural_ ,” and Carrie didn’t know how it could be that that was the worst thing to say, because while God had made nature, look at how much of it her momma hated.  Menstruation and fucking and the birthing of babies, breasts and sunshine and the strong turning on the weak.  Bare bodies.  Her.

But she could feel the lie she was telling herself, the lie she needed to make this bearable.  She could see into her momma’s heart like it was a clove of garlic pulled apart, separated into chambers.  Momma didn’t hate her.  Momma loved her and was worried even that she loved Carrie as she had loved Carrie’s father—loved her with a love surpassing her love of God, loved her in a way that would mean damnation for them both.  If Carrie looked into her any longer, she would be like Lot’s wife, would turn into a pillar of salt.

“Get out.”  Her momma’s hand scrambled at her own blouse and clawed at it, a button popping off and skipping across the floor.  She tore at own chest until blood made a comet-tail across her full-length slip, showed scarlet through the white.  “You—get out—of me.  You get out—of my house.  And go into exile.”

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” Carrie said.  She felt dizzy, lightheaded.  She had never seen someone like that before—had not known she could.  She remembered the way she had known about Sue’s fingers being sticky the day the blood had come.  The blood—was her nose bleeding?  Her face was so hot and wet from tears she couldn’t tell.  She said again, “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“Then repent,” Momma said, “and go to your grave.  Beg Him on your knees that He may dampen the flames of hell for you.  Now get out.”

She had the power.  Even with the weakness of her body, the pain in her head, the blood she could now taste on her mouth, she had the power: she did not even have to reach out her hand to claim this house as her own.  She could feel the doorways yawning open— _Are you afraid of the bogeyman?_ —and the stones of the foundation decaying slowly into dust.  The insulation in the walls and the burners on the stove.  She could turn all of it against her momma like a hand, like an enormous slap, and drive her away.

She stumbled out onto the porch instead, spitting a mouthful of bloody saliva off into the grass.

_And they shall call this place Wormwood._

**5**

It was three in the morning when Sue awoke to Carrie standing over her.  By the moonlight through the window, she had an awful, cheesy pallor, interrupted only by the slash-mark of blood from her nose to her chin.  She knew she had screamed and could still feel a rawness to her vocal chords, but she'd heard no scream.  Then Carrie exhaled and Sue felt the dull echo of her own terror in Carrie’s breath, sharp and bitter.

 _She caught it, of course,_ Sue thought, with the lack of surprise that only the very early morning ever brings.  _She caught it in her mind so I wouldn’t make any sound._

_Can I sleep here?  
_

She felt no surprise at that either.  Nor even at the way the top corner of her bed-sheets flipped down suddenly, turned into an inviting triangle with a perfect hotel-room crease.  But she finally felt something past terror, and it was a clean kind of satisfaction, entirely within her head and not her heart at all.  It was the way she felt when she had done a particularly difficult geometrical proof.  She understood at last that Carrie was doing that, too.  Carrie was blunting the edges of her shock.

But she could still say yes or no.  Maybe Carrie, like God, placed some value on free will.  Or else she just wanted to be wanted.

_Yes.  Come to bed.  
_

Carrie smiled.  Despite the blood, she had an unusually sweet smile.  She took off her thick, ugly shoes and, for the second time in a day, undressed in front of Sue, down again to nothing but her underwear, and slid shamelessly and almost nakedly into bed with her.  There was no borderline between the two of them.  Sue could feel the light, cool cotton of her sheets against Carrie’s skin.  Could understand—

_exile_

\--something.

“It’s all right,” Sue whispered, because it was something she wanted to say.  “It’s fine, Carrie.”  She took up Carrie’s hands and kissed her knuckles.  They were lying forehead-to-forehead in the dark and there was a forked vein in Carrie’s temple that was throbbing unevenly.  Her nose had started bleeding again.

Carrie, gently: _Can I touch you?_

 _She’s like a vampire,_ Sue thought.  _You have to invite her in.  You have to invite her, but then you can’t control her.  She won’t be controlled and she won’t be predicted._

But she had been gentle: had come into Sue’s mind that time with a soft hand, like velvet, when she could have been rough.

She remembered the pale pink polka dots on Carrie’s underwear, too small and faint to see by moonlight.  They were all white and gray, except for the blood, which was black.  She had told Carrie the truth.  Everything she had done, good or bad, she had wanted to do.  She was lucky enough for that to be true.

There was a kind of bottomless hunger in her.  Not for Tommy, not for Carrie, but for something to want that was not so small that she could have it just by wishing.

She took Carrie’s hand in hers and slid it up underneath her nightgown, from her thigh to her hip.  Her heart was pounding.  It had never been like this, no matter how good she and Tommy had made it last time, it had never been like it was now.  With Carrie White with blood all over her mouth and her thoughts in Sue’s head.

The nightgown was in the way so she stripped it off.  Carrie reached up further, cupped first one breast in her hand and then the other.  She had no idea what to do with them, had barely even touched herself.  She pinched one nipple and Sue cried out and let Carrie catch that cry with first her mind and then her mouth, which was hot and coppery.  She kissed badly.  She kissed earnestly.

**6**

It was just a little past dawn when the two of them woke.  Despite everything, Carrie had slept soundly: it was the first time in her life she had had a pillow.  She hadn’t known that anyone could wake up without their neck sore, the muscles feeling twisted and pinched.  She wanted to retreat back into sleep.

But instead she looked at Sue, whose pretty black hair was spread over her half of the pillow not neatly but in tangles and knots.  She had put her hands in that hair last night.  Had— _plug it up_ —put her hand elsewhere, too.  She understood vaguely that Sue had achieved something from their strange, fierce coupling that she herself had not, and understood still further that she would for a time hold onto that last little bit of unsurrendered self-denial as a token of purity, and then that one day she would give up even it.  She would go to bed with Sue again, as her mother had done with her father, and sooner or later it would happen.

Unless she left.

Sue caught her wrist suddenly, awake before Carrie could even realize it.  “Don’t go.”

“I need to.”

Sue sat up, rubbing her eyes.  “How did you get in last night?  Wasn’t the front door locked?”

Carrie said, “I opened it.”

Sue looked at her intently, almost studiously.  “I guess you did.”

_Are you scared of me?_

_You know I am_ , Sue said.  She slid half out of bed and started pulling on knee-socks.  She dressed as if Carrie were not even there: a plaid skirt and a bright green blouse.  She picked out a headband.  _Where will you go?_

 _I don’t know._ She scrubbed at her mouth, trying to get the blood off it, until Sue finally asked her to wait and left her there in the bedroom.  She came back a moment later with a damp washcloth and let Carrie wipe her face off with it.  She felt better once she was done, as if she’d removed the mark of Cain.

 _You broke a blood vessel in your eye, too,_ Sue said.  _But I think it’ll heal._

Carrie couldn’t feel anything.  She said, “I have to go,” and turned to get dressed herself.

“Wait.”  Sue grabbed her again and Carrie didn’t like it: she made Sue’s fingers flick open, her hand star-fished wide.  She felt Sue’s alarm like a police siren spinning around inside her head and reached in and turned it off.  She told herself she felt no guilt.  She simply wanted one person who would not run from her, even if she was running away herself.

“Wear some of my clothes,” Sue said, putting her hand down at her side.  “That’s all I was going to say.  Yours never look comfortable and anyway they make you stick out like a sore thumb.”

“They’re ugly.”

“That too.”

So she put on Sue’s clothes, everything but the bra, which did not fit: the same outfit as yesterday because she was worried anything else would reveal what a joke all this was.  She wondered if Cinderella had worn the same gown each night, afraid that if she didn’t, the ashes would seep through.

Sue looked her over differently now, not at all like she had looked at her the day before.  “You look good in red.”

Carrie felt a flash of mean pleasure in her, imagining her momma hearing those words, imagining her momma knew they were coming from a girl whose mouth Carrie had tasted.  She could not remember what she had done between leaving home and arriving at Sue’s, but that she had done something, and something Big, she found it hard to doubt.  Her head hurt like a rotten tooth.  Maybe she really had made the stones come again.  Maybe she had made them come everywhere in the world.  Or maybe only where they had fallen before.

_I did it, I did do it really, I went back, I turned into a pillar of salt._

She said, her voice broken, “I think I killed Momma.”

Sue opened her mouth but said nothing.  Maybe she couldn’t, Carrie thought, maybe whatever she had switched off in Sue would remain off, now.  And what would that mean?  A sick horror washed over her.

“So you need to run,” Sue said.  “That’s why you’re leaving.”

_Exile._

Sue went through her closet and took out purse after purse, stripping each one down to the lining.  She found enough stray, forgotten bills that Carrie was distracted from her guilt by a familiar kind of hatred, that Sue could have so much that she would let it grow dusty and unused.  It seemed to come to around twenty dollars, which was more money than Carrie had ever had all at once.

“For gas,” Sue said.

Carrie shook her head.  “I don’t know how to drive.”

 _I know what happens in cars,_ Momma had always said.

Sue said, “I do.”  She closed her hand into a fist around the money.  “Take me with you, Carrie.  Please.  Take me with you and I’ll—I’ll do anything.”

Yes, Carrie could see it in her: lust and shaky affection and restlessness and a longing for meaning all pitched up into what was a continuous scream.  She was what Carrie most needed to run away from.  There were no answers here, whatever she had thought.  She was still outside the circle they had drawn in the dirt: Sue had not pulled her in but stepped out to join her.

She asked what she had asked before.  “Why would you do any of this?”

“Because I want something I do to matter,” Sue said.  Her voice was shaky.  “I want something I _want_ to matter.  Let me come with you.  I can drive, and I know how to waitress a little for when we need to make money, and I’ll take care of you when you’re—like this.”

“You’ll take care of me when I’m bleeding?” she said harshly.

Sue met her eyes without hesitation.  “Yes.  I owe you that.  I want that.  And you owe _me_ , too, because you did something to me.  I can feel it.”

 _She is not one of Them,_ Carrie thought.  _Maybe.  She is one of mine, my only one._ And she was too lonely to walk away from that just out of conscience or hatred.  She wondered if she would ever again feel the presence of God, if she did this.  Momma would say no.

But Momma was dead.

“All right,” Carrie said.  “We’ll go together.”

Sue smiled, her lips trembling a little.  “Where do you want to go?”

She didn’t have to think.  “South.  Where it’s warmer.”

 _To sunbathe_ , she thought, because when you were in the very brightest, hottest sunlight, it seemed to take all thought from you.  You were nothing but body.  Lying like that with Sue on a blanket on some green yard in some town she did not yet know, all her pain and guilt and power would be harmlessly trapped in a glass bottle down deep inside her.  Just for an hour.  She would be able to reach over to Sue and take her hand.  Maybe she would even forget who she was, forget everything, maybe that would be her happy ending.


End file.
